Oscar, HBO airings add miles of smiles

So he flew to Los Angeles three years ago after sending pitches to several production offices, hoping to get a meeting and maybe a deal.

“I couldn’t get a return phone call from any of them, so I came back to New York with my tail between my legs,’’ Mullaney, cofounder and president of the New York-based Smile Train, said in a phone interview. “Then I said, ‘Let’s go to Plan B and make a documentary.’ ’’

Mullaney, 50, hired filmmaker Megan Mylan to follow Pinki Sonkar, a 6-year-old Indian girl born with a cleft in her upper lip. A $250 cleft surgery near her village funded by Smile Train transformed her looks and her life. The film, which cost $300,000 to make, won the Academy Award in February for best documentary short film.

Weekly donations to the nonprofit Smile Train doubled within days after the Oscars, although the film hadn’t been distributed in theaters and only its trailer could be seen on the Internet. Since the film’s Oscar win and airing on HBO beginning last month, the nonprofit has gained 37,000 new donors with an assist from its direct mail, print, and TV advertising efforts. With a $110 million budget, Smile Train will report a surplus this year of more than $1 million.

“We’re going to turn this Oscar gold into a million smiles,’’ Mullaney said. “It’s going to change the lives of millions of children.’’

Helping disfigured children has been a passion for Mullaney, a Dayton, Ohio, native and Harvard graduate, since seeing children with deformities on New York’s subways.

After forming an advertising company in 1990, Mullaney launched in the late 1990s the idea of a “smile train,’’ a mobile clinic that would take doctors and volunteers to perform the surgery on children in China (one of the group’s founders is of Chinese descent). Since then, the organization has done more than 520,000 surgeries in 76 countries.

“Smile Pinki’’ tells the story of how Pinki’s father, Rajendra Sonkar, learned about the Smile Train’s free surgery from a social worker who heard his daughter needed the procedure.

“There’s a deep love between Pinki and her father, and she’s clearly a daddy’s girl,’’ Mylan, 39, said in a phone interview. “You see the father holding her yellow dress before the surgery with this deep worry on his face. The love of a parent is universal, and parents can relate to that.’’

After the film was shown on HBO, the organization received more than 1,000 e-mails, Mullaney said.

“We have only 15 minutes of fame,’’ he added, “and we’re probably down to 14 by now, but we’ll leverage every ounce of it.’’